Comparing Instagram And The American Red Cross

In today’s society, organizations, such as the American Red Cross have begun to use social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook because technology has become so prominent. These social media platforms offer individuals the opportunity to participate in many forms of discourse, all of which can be accessed on their social media accounts. The American Red Cross is “an independent entity that is organized and exists as a nonprofit, tax-exempt, charitable institution pursuant to a charter granted to us by the United States Congress” (RED CROSS WEBSITE). They have been providing assistance to individuals in need since 1881 and vow to alleviate and prevent the suffering of individuals in their unfortunate times of emergency.

Furthermore, Instagram is different from Twitter in that there is no limitation pertaining to the amount of characters an individual can write in one post. On Instagram, an individual may “like,” “comment,” “share” and “bookmark” posts that they see. This allows more individuals, nearly 98 thousand not to mention the people who see the post when it gets shared, to see what the Red Cross posts and how they are advocating and sharing their journey along with them (INSTAGRAM). The setup of Instagram exhibits a comforting feeling to their users. This benefits the Red Cross in a certain aspect of their objectives because a larger number of individuals are paying attention to them as well as their missions. In John Swales book, Genre Analysis, he discusses discourse communities more in depth and states the six characteristics they need. Those six characteristics are as follows; a discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals, mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, acquired some specific lexis and has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal enterprise (JOHN SWALES BOOK). The Instagram account of the Red Cross displays all six of these characteristics and, therefore, is an exceptional example of a discourse community. The Red Cross’ Instagram shares a common goal: to alleviate human suffering due to an emergency, has ways of intercommunication through Instagram by way of commenting and direct messaging, posts informational messages (along with pictures) for all of their followers to see, contains ways of receiving feedback which include commenting and direct messaging, once again, and has acquired a lexis that is specific to the Red Cross and have